


kill(save) me by the wayside

by guiltylights



Category: Powerpuff Girls
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 19:50:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3949501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guiltylights/pseuds/guiltylights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brick looks at her standing across the rain, and hates her. –– AU-ish. Blossick. Set in the PPGD/PPG universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kill(save) me by the wayside

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            She stood across from him, hair heavy-slicked down with water and eyes sea-furious like the rain, and Brick could almost hear the sound of her teeth grinding together. They were both panting, distance between them as wide as the night sky hanging above them, as they each struggled to catch their breath.

 

            In the darkness of the night, the rain was sword-sharp silver lances, and the light of the streetlamps flickered briefly. Brick absent-mindedly wiped a smudge of blood off his cheek.

 

            She opened her mouth; Brick saw her teeth flash. 

 

 _“You’re not even sorry!”_ Blossom screamed. A little tendril of hatred flares at the bottom of Brick’s gut: hatred for little girl heroes and pain and the entire goddamn universe and yeah, her. Brick thinks he hates her.

 

            He doesn’t do anything except hate, these days. And maybe burn things.

 

            “Oh yeah?” he asks, voice slow and soft and deadly, and Brick does not even look her in the eyes. He straightens, inspects his half-bloodied knuckles. Damn, that’ll hurt in the morning. “And what should I even be sorry for?”

 

             Blossom’s hands clenched; they lit up with a furious pink glow. “For taking everything away from me! Bubbles and Buttercup, my sisters, and _Professor_ –”

 

            “Wrong.” Brick takes a step forward. In the rain his red eyes flare danger-zone in the dark, and Blossom looks at him, and wants to punch him in the face. She was never really one for violent tendencies, that had always been Buttercup’s style, but for Brick she could make an exception. Just this once.

 

            “They got taken away from you because you were too weak to protect them.”

 

            …And pink explodes out of her hands.

 

            Brick dodges them easily; he steps to the side just as the energy beams ricochets off past his ear, and draws his own hands up to his chest, closes them like fists. He readies himself, just as Blossom comes charging in his direction.

 

            It was a flurry of fists and kicks and super-powered attacks and anything-else-combined, and somewhere along the way Brick loses his baseball cap and Blossom’s red bow comes undone, but that doesn’t matter, that wasn’t what mattered. As Blossom wildly kicked out one of her legs in Brick’s direction, all she could see was her family flashing behind her eyelids; her sisters’ grin and her father’s affectionate smile and the way Bubbles looks dancing on stage and what Buttercup is like when she’s cooking in the kitchen, and–

 

            _the screams they had as Him took them all away to god knows where, Blossom on the ground ruined and injured and crying desperate like a storm. Fingers upwards, stretch-stretch-stretching towards them but they were too far away now, and Blossom didn’t save them, she **couldn’t** save them and now they were all **gone** and it was **all her fault** – _

            Brick slammed a glowing red fist into her stomach, and Blossom flew backwards with a cry.   

 

            She thudded painfully on the ground, splashing rainwater everywhere and grazing the back of her arms on the road as she struggled to get up. Brick stands in front of her, hair down and around his face (they’d both lost their hair ties somewhere in the battle – when did that happen?), and gazes down at her, all bloody and bruised and not-yet beaten, and thinks again about little girl heroes and corruptness and could-have-beens and the tragedies of being too damned upright in this world.

 

            He raises his fist, knuckles pulsing red.

 

            “… them back.” Blossom mumbles, her head down.

 

            Brick halts; he looks again at the only Powerpuff girl left in this town at his feet, raising his eyebrow in confusion. “What?”

 

            Her head snapped up. _“I said, give them back!”_ Blossom screamed, and launched herself at Brick, knocking them both over as they wrestled on the ground; fighting for something, something, _anything._ Brick looks at Blossom above him: haloed by the wet pale-orange of her hair with furious pink eyes like clapping thunder and rain falling around her face like the storm, Brick thought distantly as he struggled against her strength that she was beautiful in the way that sinking shipwrecks were beautiful: drowning, cracking, and bewitching.

 

            She was completely and utterly tragic, and Brick wonders, briefly, what it would be like to kill her with his own hands.    

 

            He knows he very nearly did, before.

 

            Brick stopped struggling against Blossom’s grip on his shoulders when Blossom did, her hands falling slack against his shoulders and bracing themselves, instead, on either side of his face. Brick, too, lets his hands fall limply away from her shoulders to land on the ground with a wet _splash_ , and Brick does not look Blossom in the eyes. It was still raining, droplets falling onto his face like tears.

 

            He does not need to look up to know that Blossom was crying over him.

****

            “Give them back to me, I miss them, they were all I had, give them back,” she sobbed, hitting his chest halfheartedly with her fists. Brick glances over the top of her head quietly as Blossom hunched over him, shaking and crying and falling apart into pieces right in front of him, and thinks (again and again and again and _again_ ) about tragedies and of picking-up-the-pieces and about little girl heroes who never really had the chance to grow up. 

 

            Brick thinks he hates the universe, sometimes, for doing this to her.

 

            It took Blossom a while to finally calm down and stop crying and hitting Brick in the chest, and when she did she simply sat on top of him, quiet and hopeless and tired for a long, long time.

 

            Brick sat up, and gently pushed Blossom in front of him. He stared seriously into Blossom’s eyes.

 

            “I didn’t take your family away, you know. Him did.”

 

            Blossom was quiet for a while. “…Yeah, I know.” She sniffled.

 

            “I didn’t know anything about Him’s plans to kidnap your family.”

           

            “Yeah, I know.”

 

           “I can’t bring your family back for you.”

 

            “Yeah, I know.”

 

            “But I _can_ help you look for them.”

 

            “Yeah, I kno– wait, what?”

 

            Brick ignores the stunned look of disbelief that Blossom throws his way; he walks over to his forgotten baseball cap lying on the rain-soaked ground. He puts it on his head. He takes out a new hair tie from his pocket, loops it around his hair. He picks up Blossom’s red hair bow tie from the ground.

 

            Brick glances back at Blossom still sitting on the ground, pink eyes wide and round and staring at him, and a look of complete and utter bafflement on her face.

 

            Brick thinks of second-chances and could-have-beens and of hating little girl heroes, and thinks maybe he does more than hate, these days. Maybe.

 

            He walks over to Blossom, and hands her the red bow. She takes it, and Brick offers her his hand. “C’mon. We’re going to go look for your family.”

 

            Blossom stares up at Brick in front of her; Brick, with his solemn red eyes and orange hair and soaked Rowdyruff uniform standing in the rain. The rain was still sword-sharp silver lances, and Brick was not a hero.

 

            Blossom grabs a hold of his outstretched hand, anyway.

 

            “Okay.”

                       

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